I love artistry, creativity, and originality, but I also understand that people are influenced by others. It’s one thing to be a poseur, blatantly ripping off other artists. However, I think it’s another thing to take what you’ve been exposed to, and use a piece of art as inspiration to create something new. How many things are purely original? I mean, even if you draw a picture of a tree with crayons, your coloring will still be your own rendering of something that already exists.
Getting to the point- I only realized last night that pop/r&b/rock band Hanson’s music video for their latest single, “Thinkin’ Bout Something” was a complete homage to the scene in the movie Blues Brothers where John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, and Ray Charles perform “Shake A Tail Feather.”
“We love playing classic songs,” says Zac Hanson in the band’s official biography. “But we never sat down and wrote our version of what that sounds like until now.”
They literally replicated the dances in the movie, nearly frame for frame, in their music video. I knew that that video was inspired by the movie, but I didn’t realize that they were so similar when played simultaneously.





